Her head was thrown back, her lips were parted. She drank in the breeze as though it were wine.
"This is the wind which Ulric and his men always loved," she murmured. "A wind from the north to the shore. Can't you feel the sting of the Iceland snows?"
"Not I?" he answered, laughing. "To me it is soft and warm enough. But then, you know, I have no imagination."
"Powers," she said suddenly, "I want to ask you a question. Is there any fear of my going mad?"
"Certainly not!" he answered. "Why do you ask me such a question?"
"I know that I am not like other girls," she said wistfully. "I cannot remember my father, or my life in India, or the voyage. When I try to think about these things my head plays me such strange tricks. I cannot remember where I was, or what I was doing a year ago--but----"
"Go on. Tell me exactly how you feel," he said encouragingly. "It will help me to put you right."
"But behind all that," she continued hesitatingly, "I seem to remember many strange things--things which must have happened a long, long time ago. They are not things I have been told about, or read of! I can remember them. They must have happened to me. Powers, it makes me afraid."
He looked at her with ill-concealed excitement.
"It is the sea," she murmured, "which seems always to be reminding me of things."
She came a little closer to him. His heart beat fiercely. Her eyes sought his--the appeal of the weak to the strong. He crushed down his joy--yet it shone in his face, trembled in his tone.
He took her hands in his. She yielded them readily, but they were cold as ice.
"I am perfectly sure of it," he declared. "You must trust in me and be patient."
She held his hands tightly as though wrung with a sudden emotion--an emotion which he realized was one of fear alone.
"Powers," she begged, "will you lock my door at night? Lock all the doors in the house."
"You have been walking in your sleep!" he said. "Tell me about it. You must tell me everything, Eleanor, if I am to succeed."
"Not in my sleep," she answered, in a low tone, "but at night, when everything is quiet, the sea calls and calls, and I cannot rest. I woke suddenly this morning at three o'clock, and I went out. Powers, as I walked and listened, the wind and the sea came to me like old friends. I remembered many strange things. I remembered people whose graves the sea has stolen from the land ages ago. I was back in those days myself, Powers. I sang their songs, my heart beat with their joys."